The list of 60 or so add-ins includes old champagne, 1995 Anchor Christmas beer, tiny bits of photos, a dram of Jim Beam from a plastic travel pint --- even wood shavings from renovation projects --- all added in amounts so miniscule that you'll never know they're present. But the McMenamins know these tokens have symbolic heft far beyond their actual mass, and proper Northwesterners will celebrate them as more evidence of the soul of the brothers and company that's helped define our corner of the world.

The ale and the anniversary party celebrate the opening of the first McMenamins pub 31 years ago. Mike McMenamin --whose wine distributorship had just failed --bought the former Fat Little Rooster tavern on Southeast Hawthorne and renamed it the Barley Mill. Brian McMenamin soon joined in and somehow, by luck, timing, grit, vision, savvy, hardheaded business sense --- perhaps by endorsing the cosmic giggle that Rolling Stone magazine once professed to in its masthead --- the company grew to a tie-dyed colossus of threescore pubs, taverns, clubs, hotels, dance halls and an enchanted village called Edgefield.

OK, "enchanted village" may seem a bit over the top to anyone waiting for a server to notice them over the Dead din, or to the beer snob railing about the sometimes-underwhelming beers. (An increasingly baseless predjudice, by the way, given the company's current emphasis on its breweries and many fine brewers.) It misses the point, anyway. The point is soul, and few companies have soul like McMenamins.

Imagine an infinitely more boring McMenaminless world where Edgefield never sprouted, where the old county poor farm continued to molder and was eventually razed so suburbs could sprawl over Edenic gardens and a golf course that were never to be, over weddings and concerts and happy picnics that never happened. Imagine Kennedy School still vacant and vandalized instead of the vibrant center of its community.

Imagine the grand old Crystal Ballroom sunk deeper into desuetude, or those glorious Tiffany chandeliers still gathering dust in the cluttered basement of a still-boarded-up Olympic Club in Centralia, Wash. Enough: Everywhere around us we can see the quirky, funky, artful McMenamins touch; can feel it gently urging us to Northwestern ideals of honoring family, community, history and sense of place. In a world where corporations clamor and clamber all over each other in pursuit of authenticity, the McMenamins soul runs deep and genuine.

They realize that ceremony and celebration are anything but frivolous and earlier this spring, two dozen brewers, longtime employees, family and friends gathered at the Hillsdale pub, the company's first brewery and Oregon's first brewpub, for a family/tribal rite called the Drink Tank, during which we sampled and celebrated each of the items added to Max's Lanson ESB.

Earlier, brewers had met at the Barley Mill in the morning to grind the grain on the pub's namesake mill, a hulking old thing salvaged from Oregon's first craft brewery, Cartwright, and now used but once a year to grind the grain for anniversary ales.

Sitting at a long table awash with bottles, glasses and half-finished plates, we were a happy and boisterous family adrift from the workaday world buzzing by outside. Brian McMenamin convened the group with a toast to beer writer/mentor Fred Eckhardt, who was absent this year, and he talked about brewer Max Zimmerman, for whom the 31st anniversary ale is named.

Zimmerman was a longtime brewer for Blatz and, here in Portland, for Blitz-Weinhard. After his death, his son invited the McMenamins to the estate sale, where they bought the Hillsdale brewery's original mash tun and brew kettle --- and an un-opened case of 1945 Lanson Champagne --- possibly the finest vintage of the century. "Can you imagine," Mike McMenamin said, "It was the end of the war. It was French Independence. And the wine was in great condition but for two bottles. For ten years straight this Champagne was the foundation ingredient of our Barley Mill Pub Anniversary Ale."

The last bottle was used in the 1995, "and it was still amazing," McMenamin says. Not to worry, there was a newer bottle of Lanson for this year's brew, which son Dan McMenamin opened with suitable dash in the cavalry manner: by whanging the lip of the bottleneck with the blunt side of a WWI bayonet (a calvary saber not being readily to hand) so the glass separated cleanly. As with all the succeeding beers, wines and spirits, the bottle was passed around the table and we all had a dram, and then a dash was poured into the bucket that would be added to the anniversary beer already boiling back in the brewery.

"Just remember," said Brian McMenamin, "at Drink Tank, you don't have to finish your glass." And there were empty pitches along the table for remainders of samples, vessels that were very handy in cases such as that 1995 Anchor Christmas beer, which I predicted would survive OK, if not unscathed, thanks to its alcohol and spice. I was wrong, as it happened.

But a dash of the beer went into the bucket, as did a 2007 Cabernet; a Chardonnay from 1979, the year Mike's daughter, Shannon, was born; a bit of Rum Runner, the 6000th beer brewed at Cornelius Pass Roadhouse; a 31-year-old Cascade stubby brewed at Blitz; Paddle Bender, an 11 percent wheat beer whose mash was so thick it actually bent the mixing paddle; a Sauterne from 1983, the year the Barley Mill opened; and much more.

Nothing was added without its story being told and honored: not the wood shavings saved from various McMenamins renovations; not the potpourri from

Edgefield gardeners (who added this note, "a pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck"); not the pictures of the speakers at McMenamins annual UFO Fest. No, they didn't add the whole photos to the kettle, just postage-stamp-sized delargements (ensmallments?), as they did with the other photos, memorabilia and brewer Graham Brogan's filled out McMenamins Passport.

Toasts were made and drunk, poems were recited, stories were shared, jokes were told and the group sometimes raised its voice in song: "Whiskey in the Jar," and "Away with Rum by Gum" a ringing denunciation of the prohibitionist urge, usually led by Fred Eckhardt.

We sampled wines, green tea, strange herbal liqueurs and vintage beers such as a 1998 bottle of Hammerhead, and after all additions had been properly sampled and celebrated, we trooped back to the brewery where pub manager Bob Luoma solemnly --- but ceremonially --- added the small bucket to rolling boil in the brew kettle.